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Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 20:40:56 -0500
From: Scott W <wegster@mindcore.net>
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To: Marty Landman <MLandman@face2interface.com>
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cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: a good way to save a keystroke?
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Marty Landman wrote:

> I wanted to look at a file and figured why not pipe the output of 
> which to more, which of course didn't work so I figured if I 
> backticked the which output with more in front that would work, and 
> apparently it does (though I'm not sure that the cmd itself wasn't 
> executed?).
>
> e.g. more `which apachectl`
>
> Is this a reasonable way to get what I'm after, or a bad thing?


It's fine, although anything inside the ticks does in fact get executed, eg
which apachectl
expands to /usr/local/bin/apachectl (not running apache, don't remember 
the freebsd location offhand but you get the point)

so then the literal text '/usr/local/bin/apachectl' replaces the command 
inside the ticks to become:

more /usr/local/bin/apachectl

So yep, it's doing what you want, the way you wanted to...use something 
similar fairly often myself, although note that the 'current' standard 
for executing commands is now $(cmd), eg

more $(which apachectl)

Scott